Divining Obama’s Next Act From His First-Term Record

Jan. 18 (Bloomberg) -- Presidential inaugurations are
traditionally occasions for stroking one’s chin and offering
sober assessments of what the president and the nation can
accomplish in the next four years.

This is bound to be an exercise in futility. Four years
ago, as Barack Obama took the oath, no one had heard of the Tea
Party, Obamacare, the Deepwater Horizon, Abbottabad, the Arab
Spring, Sheldon Adelson or the 47 percent. “Sandy” referred to
beaches or a legendary pitcher for the Dodgers, not a
devastating hurricane or a shooting at an elementary school.

It’s safe to predict that we will continue arguing in 2013
over the debt ceiling, gun violence and immigration. For
everything else, the crystal ball for this year --- not to
mention the next four years -- is cloudy.

So let’s look backward instead, to Obama’s record of
success and failure. His partial successes -- works in progress
-- offer the best clues to what he may yet achieve.

PolitiFact, a nonpartisan, Pulitzer Prize-winning website,
has kept track of the 508 promises Obama made when he was
running for president in 2008. This week, it released an
“Obameter” report that rated more than two-thirds of his
promises as “Promise Kept” or “Compromise,” a better average
than voters cynical about campaign pledges had any reason to
expect.

Kept Promises

Remember Obama’s book “The Audacity of Hope”? Looking back,
I was struck by the audacity of his five boldest 2008 promises:
universal health care, ending the war in Iraq, killing Osama bin
Laden, passing comprehensive immigration reform and creating a
cap-and-trade system to reduce global warming. The president
kept all but the last two promises, and by this time next year,
he could be 4-for-5, with only carbon trading still outstanding.

Other, lower-profile “Promises Kept” testify to Obama’s
vision of an activist government -- not Big Brother, but “my
brother’s keeper,” as he put it during the campaign.

Expanding broadband access, a credit-card bill of rights,
increasing minority access to capital, closing the “doughnut
hole” in the prescription drug plan, rural development grants, a
best-practices list for businesses to accommodate workers with
disabilities, boosting the Veterans Affairs budget for mental
health: Page after page of popular ideas that went from campaign
rhetoric to reality.

Most of the accomplishments look better up close than they
do when depicted abstractly as merely “spending.” Familiarity
with the particulars breeds respect for government, not
contempt.

The list is a reminder of the stakes in 2012. Had the
Republican nominee, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney,
and his party won the 2012 election, hundreds of the “Promises
Kept” would have become “Promises Repealed.”

Obama’s greatest failure was on housing. He pledged to
create a $10 billion foreclosure-prevention fund, which he
promised to expand to $75 billion. The aim was to help 9 million
homeowners. So far, fewer than 1 million have received
assistance. The main culprits are the banks, which dragged their
feet shamelessly on refinancing mortgages. But the
administration never figured out the right incentives to
accelerate the process.

Unemployment Rate

The president’s promises on unemployment were made before
the economy collapsed, so he can’t rightly be held accountable
for them. (The bogus forecast by his economic team in 2009 that
joblessness would quickly fall to less than 8 percent wasn’t a
promise.) But he failed to fight hard enough in 2009 and 2010 --
when he had a Democratic Congress -- for the $60 billion
infrastructure bank he promised and for small-business
initiatives that might have led to more job creation.

The president also failed to lift the cap on payroll taxes
for earnings above $250,000, which would raise enough money to
secure Social Security for the foreseeable future. And his
pledge to reduce health insurance premiums by an average of
$2,500 a year per family was pure folly.

The category “In the Works” is more encouraging. Creating a
path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, reducing oil
consumption by 35 percent by 2030 and closing the gun-show
loophole are among the promises that have a real chance of being
kept in a second term.

PolitiFact, a project of the Tampa Bay Times, also includes
a “Truth-O-Meter” that aims to keep Obama and other politicians
and public figures honest.

The president’s honesty scores over the last four years
haven’t been perfect, but they are better than the average of
politicians assessed by the site. To succeed in a second term,
he’ll have to maintain that kind of performance. Straight talk
is the only antidote to the arrogance and instinct to overreach
that often afflicts re-elected presidents.

Obama won a second term even though he failed to restore
strong economic growth. He won because of his vision of a
government that tries to solve problems instead of just getting
out of the way.

Even a Republican House and recalcitrant Senate won’t stop
him from chipping away at his pledge list over the next four
years. His success or failure will depend largely on external
events we can’t predict.

(Jonathan Alter is a Bloomberg View columnist and the
author of “The Promise: President Obama, Year One.” The
opinions expressed are his own.)